Thus Jeremy Bentham regarded amounts of pain as negative quantities to be algebraically summated with amounts of pleasure in computing the total hedonic consequences of an action or a piece of legislation. This was in accordance with the utilitarian principle that an action is justified to the extent that it tends to produce pleasure and the diminution of pain. Since
pain is most commonly used as a term for a kind of bodily sensation, it is natural to think of pleasure as having the same status. And indeed there are uses of the term
pleasure in which it seems to stand for a kind of bodily sensation. Thus we speak of "pleasures of the stomach" and thrills of pleasure. But as hedonists have often insisted, in any sense of the term in which psychological or ethical hedonism is at all plausible, the term
pleasure must be used so as to embrace more than certain kinds of localized bodily sensations. When someone maintains that pleasure is the only thing which is desirable for its own sake, he certainly means to include states of the following sort:
- Enjoying (taking pleasure in) doing something, such as playing tennis.
- Getting
This is a free page. This page contains 193 words. This
article contains 7,572 words (approx. 25 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Pleasure Access Pass.
